How Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures Amped Up Animation

Innovative and fiercely independent animation pioneers Ralph Bakshi and John Kricfalusi skewed television surreal with Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures, a 1987 show that expired in a hail of controversy after just a year. But its lasting impact on later bizarro toons like Kricfalusi’s Ren and Stimpy, South Park and even Spongebob Squarepants has secured the series’ place in animation history.

“If not for Ralph Bakshi, the ‘creator-driven’ [animation] revolution of the ’90s would probably never have happened,” the busy Kricfalusi told Wired.com in an e-mail interview. “Everyone credits Ren and Stimpy for drastically changing the way kid cartoons were made, but it really started two years earlier with Mighty Mouse.”

The show’s uncanny ability to mash madcap action and lunatic laughs into a stew of mature and juvenile humor that tickled the brains of kids and adults alike caught on quickly. The end result: Crappy ’80s animation got a serious upgrade. A DVD collection of the short-lived but influential show hits stores Tuesday.

It makes sense that a creator-driven animation revolution would be led by Bakshi, who at 18 began a decorated animation career with Terrytoons, which launched the original Mighty Mouse cartoons in the ’40s.

By the time the animation veteran hired Kricfalusi for a much more deranged Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures four decades later, Bakshi had already churned out a stream of subversive classics like Heavy Traffic, the X-rated Fritz the Cat and Coonskin. He also had delivered influential mainstream crossovers like American Pop and Lord of the Rings, an animated feature with a dark mood and fearsome violence that paved the way for Peter Jackson’s blockbuster trilogy.

Along the way, the Brooklyn-raised Bakshi got used to fighting for every controversial cartoon he created.

“It cost me a lot but I’m not complaining,” the 71-year-old Bakshi told Wired.com by phone. “The battles were huge and came at a time when the studios had very little money. I was very naive; I thought art and ideas were very important, and I thought that they could change the world. I was battling for what animation could be.”

Keys to creative innovation

That resolute dedication to his art and its animators was a character trait that came in quite handy once he teamed up with the admittedly ambitious Kricfalusi, who served as supervising director of the show. And it paid off: Bakshi’s Mighty Mouse toons served as a launch pad for not just Kricfalusi — who’s in talks with Adult Swim for a new variety show called John K. Presents while juggling the 2010 release of his art book The Art of John K. and Spumco and his various cartooning blogs — but also DC Comics animation guru Bruce Timm, Tiny Toons and Animaniacs writer Jim Reardon (who has also directed episodes of The Simpsons), Wall-E director Andrew Stanton, and many more, most of whom were greener than Greenpeace.

“They were farmboys; they used to talk about tipping cows,” Bakshi wisecracked. “Most were doing their first gigs, and I didn’t give them much in the way of comfort. But the talent was always there; I had no idea that it would be the talent that it is today. They were quite extraordinary. I was stunned by how funny they were; their humor was different and they stretched me. I ran a director’s studio, an environment that allowed everyone to be honest and unafraid of the boss. I worked very had to achieve that.”

So did Kricafalusi, who calls Bakshi “not only the most important figure in my career, but I would say in the rest of cartoon history.” Kricafalusi quickly raided animation studios for disenchanted talents looking to stretch the boundaries of toons. Before long, he had more than enough to transform what was originally a mousy parody of Superman into a subcultural standout that would sequence the genes for future television animation.

“In a week we went from not having a studio to having 35 artists on staff,” Kricfalusi said. “Many of them had been as disgruntled with the state of ’80s animation as I was and couldn’t wait to work on a cartoon that might be fun. We experimented every step of the way.”

One experiment was actually a throwback to the unit system used in the heyday of the ’30s and ’40s by the makers of Looney Tunes. “Cartoons used to evolve,” Kricfalusi said. “There was no formula. The cartoons Ralph and I made brought back the concept of evolution.”

The rewarding old-school production process, which had been discarded in favor of a depersonalized approach in the ’80s (and today), proved central to Mighty Mouse‘s influence. “Without it,” Kricfalusi said, “the creative innovations would not have showed up on-screen.” (Bakshi discusses the creative process in the exclusive clip above from the Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures DVD.)

“Prior to Mighty Mouse,” Kricfalusi said, “TV cartoons were being churned out like assembly line product, with no single person involved all through the making of a cartoon. Each department was separate and had a list of rules to abide by. There was no such thing as a ‘director.’ So we split the crew into four units, just like Looney Tunes, each unit headed by a director who would follow the cartoon from script to final edit. Everyone had a creative stake in the outcome of the films.”

Mighty Mouse controversies

That outcome included the inevitable controversies that occur when a group of highly talented, scathingly hilarious animators splice together their toons with biting social satire and mature themes.

In the episode “Mighty’s Wedlock Whimsy,” it’s hinted that peripheral characters Gandy Goose and Sourpuss are showering together, and that the show’s heroine, Pearl Pureheart, has a lovechild with Mighty Mouse’s unhinged nemesis The Cow. In “A Star Is Milked,” a toon avatar of Michael Jackson has his hair catch on fire while moonwalking, a subtle stab at the real star’s tragic burning while filming a Pepsi commercial.

Most notoriously, a short scene from “The Littlest Tramp,” in which Mighty Mouse snorts a pile of crushed flower powder, so incensed the pious whiners of the American Family Association that CBS ordered the scene cut, fearing that kids might think their hero snorts coke. (That scene is alive and well in the DVD collection.)

“We heard on the radio that some crazy preacher was raising a stink about Mighty Mouse sniffing cocaine,” Kricfalusi said. “There were plenty of other things we got away with in the cartoons that someone could have jumped on, but this flower thing was manufactured out of nothing.”

CBS released a statement in July 1988 in support of an outraged Bakshi, who compared the coke controversy to a McCarthyite witch hunt. But three months later, Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures was off the air.

For a while, it seemed like the creator-driven revolution would thrive far and wide. But recent trends, according to Kricfalusi and Bakshi, have proven otherwise.

“I think that after Mighty Mouse and Ren and Stimpy, there was a momentary belief, even among executives, in cartoons being completely created by the cartoonists themselves,” Kricfalusi said. “Mighty Mouse was the first cartoon in decades where the cartoonists had control of our medium back. But in the last decade or so, the system has drifted backwards. A lot of the work is shipped overseas again, and that makes cartoons automatically formulaic and repetitive.”

And lucrative, according to Bakshi, who spent his career hustling up funds for his challenging films.

“The first three minutes of any Pixar movie are equal in cost to my whole career,” Bakshi said. “Animators are making very good money off exquisitely good-looking films, but it’s very simple satire. The pictures are visually amazing, but only that. I don’t see anyone really shaking the boat, because the boat is the Titanic.”